Friday, January 15, 2010

The great thing about the comments at Rabett Run, is Eli learns a lot. A lot of the time Eli is not paying attention so that is a good thing. For example the great GISS Email dump. Turns out that Judicial Watch was pulling a Mo on CEI, which played Curley's nose.

The obvious back story now that it gets pointed out is that CEI had three FOIA requests pending since 2007, one for anything having to do with the error uncovered by Steve McIntyre in how Goddard incorporated post 2000 USHCN data, one asking for all Emails about McIntyre 's correspondence with GISS about this, and one (still pending) asking for any emails mentioning Real Climate. It was these pending FOIA requests that CEI threatened to sue about in November 2009 at the height of the heavy breathing on the theft of the CRU emails.

The Email dump appeared quietly in December in the Goddard FOIA library and kind of sat there like a dead fish, because, as we said earlier, they reflect well on GISS, and poorly on McIntyre and his horde. No there there for CEI, which cut its losses, moving the bet to the third FOIA. They may be disappointed again.

However, there are all sorts of opportunists out there on the wingnut right, and Judicial Watch has a history of being slightly shifty. They found the response and put out a press release

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has obtained internal documents from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) related to a controversy that erupted in 2007 when Canadian blogger Stephen McIntyre exposed an error in NASA's handling of raw temperature data from 2000-2006 that exaggerated the reported rise in temperature readings in the United States. According to multiple press reports, when NASA corrected the error, the new data apparently caused a reshuffling of NASA's rankings for the hottest years on record in the United States, with 1934 replacing 1998 at the top of the list.

a) the error only affected post 2000 data so it had nothing to do with data from 1934 and 1998b) this was about US, not global temperature anomaliesc) the difference between GISSTEMP US temperatures for 1998 and 1934 was a meaninglessly smalld) as the analysis methods changed over time the difference moved around a bit, but again, not in a way that was significant.

You should play a game. See if you can guess which email is going to be taken out of context as proof of ..something or other.

Eli has been thinking of packaging his essays together and selling it to Lubos and Judicial Watch as the book of Eli.

Of course, Judicial Watch was too stupid to figure out that the Emails showed GISS reacting promptly and carefully to correct the error. OK, they called McIntyre a clown, but, let's be honest here, comparing him to Judicial Watch is like comparing George W. Bush to Lyndon LaRouche.

The interesting point is whether one could ask NASA for all Emails mentioning McIntyre. My sense is that you could, but that they would not provide you McIntyre's Email, just their own that mention McIntyre.

Reto Ruedy did not pull the plug on McIntyre, the sysop did, because McIntyre's robot (read the letter) was swamping the server, denying service to others.

McIntyre's position is essentially that of the asshole who drives fast in the right hand lane when it is raining, spattering everyone on the sidewalk and harumphing that he did nothing wrong when someone throws a brick his way.

Any Canucks here wishing to see if they can get access to their email history? They have good reason-- looking for more evidence of CA and its affiliates harassing scientists and evidence of hidden funding sources that would compromise their alleged objectivity.

Is he guilty of asking questions with intent? Being found in possession of the correct answer? Conspiring to get to the truth? Operating a website with due care and attention. Blogging whilst Canadian?

Bunnies aren't just cute like everybody supposes They got them hoppy legs and twitchy little noses And what's with all the carrots? What do they need such good eyesight for anyway? Bunnies, bunnies It must be bunnies

I see MarkR has such an infatuation with McIntyre that he doesn't see the problem with McIntyre.

Allow me to point one issue out to him:a) McIntyre was crawling on the GISTEMP websiteb) The sysop stopped the activity, considering it to be a botc) McIntyre complainedd) NASA allowed him back on, as long as he kept his activity limited to some time points that did not bother otherse) McIntyre then claims in newspaper interviews he was blocked BECAUSE he was Steve McIntyre, and that he was unblocked BECAUSE he was Steve McIntyre and has a big blog-audience.

Add to that his uncanny ability to make enormous mountains out of molehills, and his demand that *certain* people are to help him, even if the original data can be obtained from the original source. For example, GHCN is set up to allow mass data downloads. McIntyre instead goes to the GISTEMP homepage and complains it does not allow this (note: it's the SAME data as the GHCN).When Briffa gets data from Russians, McIntyre keeps on bugging Briffa to give him the data, even though 1) Briffa already indicated it wasn't his to give, and 2) McIntyre already HAD the data.When Santer writes a critical article about Douglass et al, using the SAME data as Douglass et al, McIntyre demands *Santer* sends him the data.

Ruedy, Hansen, Schmidt, and a whole lot more people at NASA had to spend hours on answering the media after McIntyre and co made an enormous fuzz about a tiny little thing.

Notice a pattern here? It's bothering the people doing the good science. Get them off that path by bothering them as much as possible. That's the way Steve McIntyre works: He doesn't audit any of the bad scientists, like a Willie Soon (the Soon and Baliunas paper should have been an obvious target, if he's so worried about bad methodology). Why? Because he actually has no intention to get bad science out of the literature. His intention is to attack a certain group of people.

a) Used standard R utility for the purpose for which it was intended, on data which was publicly availableb)Sysop stopped activity wrongly believing it was a bot.c)McIntyre asked nicely about it.d)NASA corrected their mistake.e)Any evidence to support your last wild left hook?

As to the rest, McIntyre has pointed out correctly that the recent temps are no warmer than the 30's, that the raw data is corrupted by UHI effect, that the Hockey Stick was a fraud.

I'm sure being the unbiased scientist you are, you will give him lavish credit?

And he does all this for free.

Briffa paid for the Russian data therefore to say it wasn't his to give was a lie. 2 McIntyre didn't have the same data (another lie).

Are you claiming that at the time, the GISTEMP data was the same as the GHCN?

The bad scientists are Mann and the CRU Hockey team who have bullied and suppressed any alternative science, admitted in their emails. They are corrupt, and very likely criminal, as they will hopefully soon find out.

MarkR - thatsvery gullible of you. How come its ok toinsinuate scientific fraud on a vast scale and spend years hounding said scientists via the internet, demanding the e-mails and data and everything, yet when someone asks about McIntyre you believe everything he puts on his website?

As for your other comments:

"McIntyre has pointed out correctly that the recent temps are no warmer than the 30's,"- scientifically incoherent.

"that the raw data is corrupted by UHI effect" - an outright lie.

"that the Hockey Stick was a fraud." - an outright lie.

So 2 lies and one comment which is incomprehensible. Its a good thing I'm not taking you seriously.

Regarding my left hook:http://townhall.com/Common/PrintPage.aspx?g=b987fd16-4369-4a1f-b31a-6e24b06c7049&t=cand I quote:

“After I was blocked and I explained myself they still didn’t want to let me have access to the data,” McIntyre lamented. He continued: “They just said go look at the original data. And I said no, I want to see the data you used. I know what the original data looks like. I want to see the data that you used. But one of the nice things about having a blog that gets a million and half hits a month is that I then was able to publicize this block in real-time and they very quickly withdrew their position and allowed me to have access.”

As to the rest of your claims: bogus. McIntyre has not proven one yota that the data is affected by UHI. Neither has he proven that the hockeystick was a fraud (he will even set you straight if you make that claim on his blog).

And yes, McIntyre DID have the data. He admitted he did. He just "wasn't sure it was the same". Damn, what a poor excuse.

Of course, while you are angry about supposed bullying by Mann et al, you don't care about the obvious rigging of the peer review process by Chris de Freitas (those 6 editors definately didn't leave because they were bullied by Mann et al...). It's all political in your mind.

Marco, you have indeed drunk deep of the koolaid. how does “After I was blocked and I explained myself they still didn’t want to let me have access to the data,” become in your tiny mind, "McIntyre then claims in newspaper interviews he was blocked BECAUSE he was Steve McIntyre?

"...yet when someone asks about McIntyre you believe everything he puts on his website?" I believe it cos he reproduces the emails voluntarily.

Unlike Jones at CRU who is recorded as saying, why should he give access to data he has 20 years invested in to someone who wants to find fault with it". Jones is a coward, who won't open his data and methods to public scrutiny, and who deliberately lies and misleads with his self confessed trick. Hide the decline. Hide the decline. Hide the decline. Hide the decline.

MarkR:All you just proved is that some idiots have called the hockeystick a fraud. McIntyre has recently even went on record in some of the media that he did not think there was anything fishy going on with the Briffa-analysis. And he definately did not ever call Mann's reconstructions "fraud". If you don't believe me, post a message on climateaudit stating "Steve, you have proven the hockeystick to be a fraud", and see how he reacts. Be sure to link it here, I don't go to there.

Regarding McIntyre's claims: he IS implicitely stating there that he did not get access because he is Steve McIntyre, since he did not get access again right away.

MarkR has proved that he cannot accept evidence even when put right in front of his face. He has identified himself as a "birther" on a different thread. He denies the existence of HIV. He is clearly incapable of logical thought. I just wanted to remind everyone of that.

One more from MarkR - when you get the output from a FOIA dump from teh US Government, you get the equivalent of photocopies. That's so the agency can redact sensitive information. Do you need someone to cut up your food for you, too?

Just to point out a correction Kramm made of things I was inferring about him, over at Arthur Smith's place:

Marion Delgado,

this is one of your stupid arguments. I was never a student of Syun Akasofu. I earned my doctoral degree in meteorology at the Department of Physics of the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. My adviser was Karlheinz Bernhardt, one of the leading theoretical meteorologists in Germany. When I joint the Geophysical Institute of UAF in 2001, the Director was Roger Smith, but not Akasofu. The former was and is still GI Director and my supervisor, the latter was the Director of the International Arctic Research Center (IARC). I never worked for the IARC.

Gerhard Kramm

I knew much of that but I assumed after the got to UAF he'd somehow transferred to being under Akasofu, and that was mistaken.

Marco. Manns statistical process that he hid in a censored directory would produce a Hockey Stick whatever data was input. That is from the Wegman Report. Wegman is President of The American Statistical Society. It was a Fraud. What would you call it?

Mark. Obama has never provided his long form Birth Certificate showing which Hospital he was born at and by which Doctor.

There is no certified electron microscope photo of the HIV.

Deech 56. I believe the CRU emails were released in a form which was searchable. It isn't necessary to revert to Stone Age data processing methods.

The scientists who fought back against Stalin and lost their careers, their freedom, and even their lives opposing Lysenkoism would turn in their graves if they saw how easily the trolls here take their Teabagger Science from the Central Committee and run with it.

dhogaza, MarkR has denied and shifted the goalposts on HIV. In another thread, Marco provided him with some links and a DOI for a peer-reviewed paper that isolated HIV. MarkR didn't even know (and probably still doesn't know) what a DOI is. The idea of investigating the scientific literature is completely foreign to him, perhaps because it would show him how misguided his beliefs are.

A $10,000 gift to hospitalWND editor says he will make donation if Obama releases long-form document http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=105840

Do come back and let us know about your winnings. dhogaza stillcan't get past ad hominem. Try a real argument, you'll find it refreshing after the usual one way traffic on your favourite censored blogs.

For those of you who are curious about what MarkR looks like, an unimpeachably reliable source of mine pointed me to this picture of him: http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/upload/2009/04/weekend_diversion_do_tinfoil_h/tinfoil-hat.jpg

To all those technical bunnies out there. Is there a way for Mr. McI and Dr. McKitrick to delete their uni emails forever? If so, don't share, just a yes or no will suffice.

They may be feverishly deleting emails after reading this thread, but it is my understanding that if the uni has made backups those emails may well no longer be accessible to McI and McK, but they will be on whatever medium the uni uses to make backups.

There are many reasons for needing to see those emails. Are they linked with the FF industry? Have they been conspiring to harass scientists whose work they do not like? Do they have ties with dubious groups such as "Friends of Science or Tom Harris's group. Have they been feeding CanWest reporters misinformation and guiding/encouraging them to publish anti-science content. Just how much did they know about the Briffa data whilst "investigating" him and making accusations of him hiding the data. Did they have any links to the CRU hack?

Bunnies and their friends need to be more aggressive. Hopping around in the meadow and baring one's teeth at intruders is not enough. Now bunnies are known to have sharp teeth and need to use them-- speaking in metaphorical terms of course.

Mann is being investigated. Well, alas, in many people's minds he is now damaged goods, just b/c someone is looking into his work at Penn State, regardless of the fact that he is probably innocent. Maybe the denialists need some of their own medicine? I'm sure it would also reveal some stunning insights into how they are "conducting business".

Time for bunnies and their allies to group and take some action on this. This bunny would happy for the emails under FIPPA, but can't. This is best done by a group or individual who does not give a rat's ass what they do to him/her.

Well rabbet is lying. In the course of writing the book on climategate I spent a bunch of time reading everything that steve wrote. I think I covered most of it. I dont recall him ever saying they blocked him because he was McIntryre.

http://climateaudit.org/2007/05/17/giss-blocks-data-access/

Is a good place to start: Of course, rabbet will avoid the facts and he and other will go off on some tangential escapade.

Pull quotes

It was hard to figure out why it stopped working. When I went back and tried to do things line by line, I found that it wasn’t reading. Now there had been a few missing records which caused my read program to file and to require restarting at the next record (this could be fixed but it seemed just as easy to restart if it didn’t happen too often). After a while, I checked some records that I’d already downloaded and these failed. I wrote to the GISS webmaster wondering about the 403 diagnostic.

I have no particular objection to the webmaster blocking access until he was assured that the inquiry was legitimate or even that the webmaster referred the matter to his bosses. I also have no objection to how long GISS took to remove the block. If all climate data access issues were resolved this quickly, it would be great. Reasonable people can differ about whether they would have been so responsive in the absence of blog publicity. I happen to think that the publicity to the issue facilitated resolution of the matter, but I can’t prove that they wouldn’t have resolved it anyway. On the other hand, I don’t think that any of my actions were unreasonable.

The only cases that come close to raising the issue of GISS denying the data based on the fact that it was McIntyre requesting it come up in the dialog that ensued following the initial block. That is, an IP was blocked. Mc Inquired and identified himself as the requestor. there was a promise to lift the ban and apparently some delay in lifting it. Mc didnt complain that they blocked it because it was HIM or were slow to lift the block because it was him. Rabbett owes an apology. In the absence of any documentary proof showing that McIntyre said otherwise, Rabbet should at the very least say 'he doesnt know that McIntyre said what he claimed Mc said." If rabbett cannot understand written discourse with any better skill than he demonstrates here, I don't trust him with numbers.And If he cant admit a MINOR error, then he is a denialist of the worst order. Anyways, Another pull quote for you all. Note the words rabbet. One cant prove the case either way. So, move along nothing here to see. Or maybe there is? If you can find and produce a quote supporting your contention I would gladly retract my statement that you lied. That was a bit harsh, lets just say you worked from a faulty memory. In any case, you produce the quote. If you can I will say:

A. I was wrong about you.B. I was wrong about McIntyre and he did jump to a conclusion about GISS that was unwarrented.And C...its a difference that makes no difference.

So, McIntyre, pull quote for those too lazyto check there facts

I don’t think that I “whined” or was “indignant”. I’ve reviewed my postings, which, for the most part, merely recorded the progress of the correspondence. At the end of it, I expressed mild satisfaction that I had been successful in getting service restored and believe that blog power had something to do with it. I draw this conclusion in part because of the curtness of Ruedy’s closing remark. However, I cannot prove that this was not their intention all along not can you show the opposite. Nor am I worried about it very much. As noted above, I’m satisfied that, in this one case, I’ve been able to get access to data relatively promptly, however it came about. Lee, maybe you can help getting Lonnie Thompson’s data.

I think Eli is probably mis remembering the discussion. There were a few issues on the table that steve didnt have a full grasp of, like what a robot was, where robot policies are documented, what scraping was. once GISS understood it was him and they promised access there was some delay ( apparently) in providing the access but in the end the access was granted.

There's misremembering what Steve McI said, and there's also picking up the general noise of the blogosphere and mistaking it for what Steve McI himself said.

In any event, I'm not going to take the time to go looking for McI quotes, so unless somebody else finds some accusations from McI, I consider the robot/IP block thing to be a non-issue, where everything got worked out more or less how it should have.

Somebody up the list said:As to the rest, McIntyre has pointed out correctly that the recent temps are no warmer than the 30's, that the raw data is corrupted by UHI effect, that the Hockey Stick was a fraud.

Try not to be an idiot dude. At least not in public. Not an idiot in the sense of the wrongness of the three claims you make, but an idiot in the sense that you don't know that the people who read this blog aren't snowed with such "facts", like they are at McIntyre's site, amongst others.

There were a few issues on the table that steve didnt have a full grasp of (longish list follows)

Imagine that! Other than (1)the robustness of various statistical analyses of past temperature proxies, (2) the role of statistical procedures in the broader scientific inference process, and (3) the motives and practices of individual scientists in conducting their research, and (4)that there is no evidence of any "Team" conspiracy, regardless of how many times he slanders them with the term....other than that, I cannot imagine Stevie not having a full grasp of the issues he discusses. In fact it absolutely boggles the mind that anyone would ever imagine such a scenario.

Steven, I already linked to an interview with Steve McIntyre http://townhall.com/Common/PrintPage.aspx?g=b987fd16-4369-4a1f-b31a-6e24b06c7049&t=cIn which he directly claims that he was unblocked because he was Steve McIntyre. At the same time his claim to have not done anything wrong is suggesting he was blocked because he was Steve McIntyre. McIntyre is pretty good at making hidden claims and then let his cheering crowd run away with the interpretation. I've never seen him correct that, apart from the initial fraud claims about Briffa. Which he, of course, has now repeated in nicely worded language by claiming Briffa yielded to Mann's pressure (which Deepclimate has shown to be a lie).

McIntyre clearly reads the comments, but hardly ever goes in and stops one of his cheering crowd making unsubstantiated claims (which notably includes his dear partner Ross McKittrick).

read more closely. I say the same things to McIntyre readers who misrepresent what he writes. twnhall:

“this led to a bit of a fight with NASA in May. As I started downloading the data in sequence they cut off my access to the data.”

“They blocked my IP address,”

true

“After I was blocked and I explained myself they still didn’t want to let me have access to the data,” McIntyre lamented.

true:

NASA:If you are indeed the person who has been running that particular web robot, and if you do need access to some large amount of the GISTEMP station ..., then you should contact the GISTEMP research group to explain your needs. E-mail addresses for the GISTEMP research group are located at the bottom of the page at...

STEVE:Dear Dr Ruedy, I have been unable to locate an organized file of station data as used by GISS (such as is available from GHCN). In the absence of such a file, I attempted to download data on all the stations using a script in R.

STEVE:I am blocked from access to the page where the email addresses are located.How can I download the data then?

NASA:Good point. That was foolish of me to suggest checking a page on which access had been turned off.

NASA:

Please contact the GISTEMP group and inquire if they are willing to provide you with the dataset(s) from which the website applications extract information.If they are not (I do not know what their current policy on this), then you can go a step closer to the source and obtain station data from the same location that the GISTEMP group obtains the original “raw” datasets that they work from. That is the Global Historical Climatology Network....

NASA:

... If you are interested in individual stations, you are much better off working directly with the GHCN data.Our station data are really intermediate steps to obtain a global anomaly map, and are not to be viewed as an end result. ...If you still think that downloading our “scratch pads” is important to your investigations, please let me know exactly what stage after the raw GHCN data you need and maybe an indication why you need it, and I’ll try to provide you with the necessary data.

NOW lets return to the rest of twnhall:

“They just said go look at the original data. And I said no, I want to see the data you used. I know what the original data looks like. I want to see the data that you used. .."

Since you appear to not understand all the issues involved Let me see if I can explain simply.

GHCN has a variety of data in a variety of stagesRaw, adusted a little, adjusted more, adjusted for urban effects.

GISS CLAIMS that it ingests this data after certain adjustment stages. So, the FIRST check that you want to do is to check the following:

GISS claim to ingest version X from GHCNstep 1: get version X from GHCN (easy)Step 2: get what NASA thinks it retrived.step 3: Compare.

So steve was retriving, station by station what NASA had on its site. ( what it claims it gets from GHCN) That was slow. So he wrote a script in R to automate the process. you follow? get it?

They shut down that IPHe contacted themThey said contact the researchers and look at the mail contacts for further info.He did that, BUT he was still blocked from that site.The webmaster apologized.Steve then got responses from people saying"go to GHCN" that is where WE got it.

1. steve already knew this.2. That doesnt give him what he requested

What he requested was the data that NASA used..NOT a pointer to the source they CLAIM to have got it from, but rather their copy of it.

BASIC QUALITY CHECK

So, if you actually read the may 17th posting and all the mails you would understand the townhall piece.

GISS claimed to get data from GHCNTo audit this and the adjustments they claimed tomake he requested the raw data they used ( which should match GHCN) and the code.

They finally gave access to the data BUT not the code.

This is MAY.

Then later the Y2K problem happens.

Now remember one of the reasons for getting the raw data from GISS is to check on how they ingest the data. To do this right you want the code.But we didnt have access to the code

Steve Writes

The first three panels of the figure compare the GISS raw version to three USHCN versions: “raw”, time-of-observation adjusted (TOBS) and adjusted (filnet). In 1951, the Detroit Lakes station moved from the back yards of DL 2.1 NNE to KDLM radio station. For the period 1951-1999, the GISS raw version is virtually identical to the USHCN adjusted version (which in turn is virtually equal to the TOBS version.)But look at what happens in 2000. The input version at GISS switches from the USHCN adjusted/TOBS version to the USHCN raw version (without time-of-observation adjustment). This imparts an upward discontinuity of a deg C in wintertime and 0.8 deg C annually. I checked the monthly data and determined that the discontinuity occurred on January 2000 – and, to that extent, appears to be a Y2K problem. I presume that this is a programming error.

@Steven:First of all, the code for GISTEMP can be downloaded, and it shows exactly what data is being used. No need for McIntyre to demand NASA give their copies, since they are the same. Of course, the problems with the source linking only affected 2000 and beyond, and within a few hours, suddenly ALL of the data of GISTEMP was declared suspect (make that "wrong").

It still does not alter McIntyre's unproven assertion (townhall-interview) that being McIntyre helped to get NASA to take action.

Mark, I told you to try to not be an idiot in public. Or was that the other Mark? I mean, at least give it a try man, you might like it!

1. Global warming is concerned with...ready?...global temperatures, not N. American, or any other restricted geographic area for that matter. And, NO analysis shows the 1930s to be the warmist decade.

2. The Urban Heat Island effect does not affect the global temperature increase over the 20th C, as has been clearly demonstrated both by leaving out questionable stations, and by the magnitude of the correction at such stations if they are left in.

3. When you use the word "fraud" you are making an accusation about the intent of a scientist. Are you aware of this fact? An accusation which you know nothing whatsoever about, because you neither know Mike Mann, nor understand why he used the analysis methods he did. Oh, and by the way, the Wegman Report is a joke. Try the National Research Council's instead. But then that doesn't give you the result you want to hear, does it?

4. I'm not wading into another of McIntyre's trails that disappears in the weeds (done that too much already), but he clearly doesn't understand the whole concept of "robust" analysis. This is why he goes off on things like the method of principal components used by Mike Mann, and the exact tree cores used by Keith Briffa in an isolated area of Siberia, even though the original analyses were targeted at the hemispheric to global scales.

Marco: Uor link to townhall.com doesn't seem to contain anything to support your assertion that, "It still does not alter McIntyre's unproven assertion (townhall-interview) that being McIntyre helped to get NASA to take action." And would it really matter? I think not.

@Mark:"But one of the nice things about having a blog that gets a million and half hits a month is that I then was able to publicize this block in real-time and they very quickly withdrew their position and allowed me to have access."

The funny thing about this discussion is that we are expected to accept McIntyre's interpretation of his words in the interview and emails, and his explanation of the spin he put on events, especially in the interview, which was geared for a public audience, of course, not just a communication between a couple of people as emails usually are.

These same people not only do not accept the explanation by the scientists of words taken out of context from stolen emails, they vilify and attack people based on the distortions they make of their words, and apparently even write books purporting to find all sorts of fraud and conspiracy.

""But one of the nice things about having a blog that gets a million and half hits a month is that I then was able to publicize this block in real-time and they very quickly withdrew their position and allowed me to have access."--

Well, no. Exactly the opposite. They politely asked him to do this at times of non-peak traffic since he was messing up the server by doing it during the day. The moral I draw here is that Goddard was bending over backwards to accommodate McIntyre even though his initial actions and remonstrations were suff. to warrant a less obliging response.

Regarding FOI. Not sure of Canadian law, but under U.S. law, just having a university mail address does not allow your emails to be FOIA'd. You would have to be an employee of the university. For example, students often have univ. email addresses, but you could not FOIA them, unless they were actually doing some type of official univ. business. The purpose of FOIA is to make transparent the activities of public employees doing the public's business. Docs. can only be requested that clearly pertain to public business and the request has to make clear that distinction to eliminate fishing expeditions into someone's personal affairs.

Jere KrischelPosted Jan 23, 2010 at 2:12 AM | Permalink | ReplyWow. Steve, you’re a god damn saint for all the crap you’ve put up with from these yahoos. Thank you from the bottom of my heart on behalf of every human on the planet for calmly, rationally, and rightfully holding their feet to the harsh fire of truth.

Some say that one man can’t make a difference – you keep proving them wrong again and again and again.

Mahalo nui loa!

Craig LoehlePosted Jan 23, 2010 at 9:49 AM | Permalink | ReplyI second that. I get about 1% of the crap that Steve gets, being only a minor jester to these guys, and it turns my stomach sometimes. http://climateaudit.org/2010/01/23/nasa-hide-this-after-jim-checks-it/

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional. His colleagues are smart, but they have a curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they occasionally heed his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.